It is 9 years since we launched CFD Direct to undertake the maintenance, production and release of OpenFOAM on behalf of the OpenFOAM Foundation, and provide support, training and cloud services to users of OpenFOAM. The Foundation is the copyright holder of OpenFOAM and exists to ensure its distribution exclusively as free, open source software under the General Public License (GPL) v3. CFD Direct does all the work for the Foundation to meet its objectives. For the tens of thousands of users that depend upon OpenFOAM, we summarise the principal activities of CFD Direct each year. Below is the summary for our 9th year, ending March 2024.
Development and Maintenance
Developments introduce new functionality to the software, which then must be maintained into the future. We undertook 797 man-hours of new developments, with 789 code commits to the public development line of OpenFOAM (OpenFOAM-dev), an increase of approximately 20% from the previous year.
Maintenance is the essential redesign, repair and publishing work that adds minimal new functionality to the software, but instead targets the critical needs of users: accessibility, usability, robustness and extensibility. In year 9, we undertook 1438 man-hours of maintenance work supported by the 2023 maintenance funding at the OpenFOAM Foundation. We resolved 100 issues on the Issue Tracking Site.
In Year 9, OpenFOAM v11 was released which included modular solvers written as classes, in contrast to the traditional application solvers, integral to OpenFOAM since icoFoam in 1993. Modular solvers are simpler to maintain and extend, and are more flexible for multi-region simulations, e.g. conjugate heat transfer (CHT) with any type of flow, e.g. multiphase. OpenFOAM v11 also included the redesign of dynamic mesh functionality, replacement of the liquid-film functionality and consolidation of the non-conformal coupling (NCC) functionality.
Developments in Year 9 exploited the new functionality in v11 to improve simulations with multiple regions. Domain decomposition and redistribution, and automatic refinement, was integrated further with NCC. Mesh tools for multiple regions were upgraded, including stitchMesh and mergeMeshes. Work continued on the replacement of Lagrangian functionality, including improvements to particle injection.
By the end of Year 9, OpenFOAM could simulate IC Engines, including piston and valve motion. The capability was produced in collaboration with Wärtsilä, Finland and partner organisations, starting in October 2021. The functionality was made publicly available in the development line of OpenFOAM, with example cases in the ICengines repository.
OpenFOAM Foundation
Our work for the OpenFOAM Foundation included the following:
- producing the major OpenFOAM v11 release and subsequent v11 patch releases, accompanied by release notes and documentation;
- packaging the development line,
OpenFOAM-devregularly for Ubuntu, other Linux distributions, Windows and macOS; - publishing the openfoam.org website and the subdomain websites for Issue Tracking, Source Guide and Downloads;
- hosting OpenFOAM Hub Q+A events for supporters of OpenFOAM, with talks and demonstrations previewing the latest features in OpenFOAM and forthcoming plans.
OpenFOAM Training
In November 2023, Aidan Wimshurst joined the team at CFD Direct. Aidan is the person behind Fluid Mechanics 101, a popular resource on the internet focusing on the fundamentals of CFD. During Year 9, Aidan and Chris Greenshields began work on Principles of CFD [announced 29th May 2024], a new training course which aims to help users plan and evaluate the CFD simulations effectively. The course establishes principles for effective planning and evaluation, involving preparatory, diagnostic and objective calculations. It uses OpenFOAM’s coded frameworks to make these calculations, and is backed by the knowledge provided in Notes on Computational Fluid Dynamics: General Principles.
During Year 9, we ran 48 days of OpenFOAM Training, updated for OpenFOAM v11, with our Essential CFD, Applied CFD and Programming CFD courses. Courses were delivered as Virtual Training to the general public and hosted on-site at companies. We updated all our courses to the latest version of OpenFOAM, to include: the use of modular solvers and the foamRun application; the snappyHexMeshConfig utility to preconfigure input files for meshing;the foamToC utility to search the contents of OpenFOAM; updated post-processing functionality; and, enhancements to dictionary input syntax, e.g. #includeModel, #calc.
Cloud
CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®) provides a turnkey platform including OpenFOAM v11 and related software, running in the cloud. CFDDFC has over 1000 subscribers running millions of core-hrs of AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). It allows low cost of running CFD in the cloud by using cheaper, spare capacity with EC2 Spot Instances, and enables users to rent hardware when needed, rather than purchasing, housing and administering the hardware on-premises.
We include our CFDDFC command line interface (CLI) to manage instances, transfer CFD cases to and from instances, run OpenFOAM applications and connect via the browser desktop. Our current AWS marketplace products include:
- CFDDFC (x86), with secure remote desktop access to a full graphical environment with ParaView visualization and FreeCAD.
- Web CFDDFC (x86), with secure remote desktop via a browser to the same graphical environment as above.
- CFDDFC (Arm) for batch running at a lower on-demand cost.